TrustNews Sep 20

The Planning White Paper

In my experience the planning process has never been entirely satisfactory, but in Winchester it was at its best following local government reorganisation in 1974. Before then the City Council was just that, the small city area alone with negligible planning skill available in a department where the building inspector had originally been the mayor's chauffeur. But reorganisation enlarged the area for which the Council was responsible to include a very large district, much as it is now.

A multi-skilled planning department was then recruited and headed by a highly qualified architect-planner who had been the deputy chief at the County Council and, amongst others, he brought with him the City’s first Conservation Officer, another experienced architect-planner. As a director he attended cabinet meetings and thereby ensured that good planning and design were always taken into consideration. Sadly, since then there has been a downward slide with government cuts gradually reducing the Council’s ability to employ sufficient staff, and critically downgrading the influence of design and planning in the City's affairs, until the last Chief Executive was able to answer our question about who was responsible for design amongst his officers, by saying that surely design was the developers’ responsibility! And now the government, in a new white paper, is proposing a wholesale revision of the nation’s planning system with over-simple reasoning that could very easily make matters far worse.

A member of the Trust wrote the following article in 2016, which was true then and remains true today and, to quote our chairman, may very well turn out to be just as true in 20 years’ time.

Michael Carden